Thomas Smith, a private with Callaway's Rangers, founded a small town along the Missouri River in 1818, and the settlement, called Smith's Landing, centered on steamboat commerce that brought in goods and exported crops such as tobacco and grain. In 1848 Smith's Landing became St. Auburt, and river traffic sustained it through the steamboat heydey of 1857, but recurring floods and declining traffic weakened the town. After a devastating flood in 1888, St. Auburt could not recover and its people soon disbanded, with some former residents using the arrival of the Missouri-Kansas-Eastern Railroad to build a new town near the tracks, even moving some buildings from St. Auburt to the new site. The new town at first kept the St. Auburt name, but when residents were denied a post office because another on the south side of the river already had that name, they held a naming contest and chose Mokane, referring to the Missouri-Kansas-Eastern Railroad. By 1893 Mokane had quickly become an important railroad hub as the halfway, or division, point between St. Louis and Sedalia, leading to expanded infrastructure including a roundhouse and the MK&T Hotel for railroad employees, and it also served as an unloading point for shipments bound for Fulton. Around 1900 the town built a small jail, and soon after its completion the man in charge of building it was arrested for public intoxication and became its first occupant. In the early 1920s the St. Louis-Sedalia division point moved west to Franklin junction near Boonville, beginning Mokane's decline; during the 1920s and 1930s the Missouri Veneer Co. factory, rather than the railroad, was the main employer, and the population fell from 726 in 1920 to 185 in 2010. Mokane is also home to a house built in St. Louis for a demonstration neighborhood at the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair and later moved, probably by train, to its present site by a member of the MKT Railroad, and today the town holds an annual Mokane World's Fair. In 1973 AmerenUE announced plans to build a nuclear power plant in the Reform area near Mokane, construction began soon after, and the plant became fully operational in 1984; its cooling tower stands 553 feet tall and 430 feet in diameter at the base, uses Missouri River water in the cooling process, and the project brought major economic benefits to Callaway County through jobs and tax revenue.